It’s often said that people (or more importantly, literary agents) will stop reading your book if you haven’t hooked them within the first sentence.

I suspect that this is probably a little pessimistic, but it’s true that given the intensely competitive nature of getting published in fiction, starting strong is critically important.

But the opening scene has another important role, as well as hooking a reader. You need to set up the ending.

“What?” I hear you cry. “That’s all backwards! I’m going to work up to my ending.”

Well, yes. But also, no. A satisfying climax cannot just come out of the blue. Everything has to be foreshadowed, and a truly elegant novel will have given you all the clues right at the outset.

All satisfying stories are in essence about how a character changes (feel free to disagree with me about this statement in the comments). I like to define this change in terms of what a character wants, and what they need. Read more about this 'character journey' here.

What a character wants tends to be external – such as money, a particular partner, a job, etc. What a character needs is about personal fulfilment, and is usually some form of compassion or courage.

In the final climax, your character should be faced with a difficult challenge, where they must choose between finally getting what they’ve wanted all along, or sacrificing that in order to be who they need to be – and in doing so, realising what they actually needed all along.

In order to give this climax impact, the opening scene should foreshadow the entire thing. That means you need to introduce your protagonist and establish what they want and what they need.

Then there should be some kind of challenge – this may or may not be the inciting incident (or call to action) to which they make the wrong decision – i.e. their response is fully motivated by what they want.

This (usually selfish) decision then leads to a cascade of mishaps and challenges which they spend the rest of the book dealing with, until finally, at the end… well, we’ve already been through this.

Take another look at your opening scene from this perspective and you may find you're able to strengthen it by ensuring these elements are there.

Please leave any comments or thoughts on this below.

Bet that bear packs a punch.

There are few things more disappointing than an unsatisfactory ending. We get these all the time in real life, so in fiction, we like all the loose ends tied up and for everybody to get their just desserts.

Here are three must-haves for your awesome novel ending.

 

Go big or go home

The final scene should be BIG. You can achieve this in a number of ways.

 

Involving more people than you’ve had in any previous scene:

• Maybe all the characters with intertwining stories finally come together in one big hullaballoo

• Or maybe it’s a crowd of extras to intensify the action and chaos (this could be a slavering audience, a group of protesters, a party)

 

Going to a new dramatic location

• Somewhere high up, perhaps, with big views and lashing weather

• Somewhere with lots of people (see above), such as a gladiatorial arena

Ideally you’ll involve all of the factors that give a sense of scale, by crashing all the major characters together, along with a big crowd of onlookers, in a gladiatorial arena at the peak of a mountain in the middle of a storm.

Obviously that’s only going to work in certain types of stories, but a lot of these elements can be used in all genres. Having an onlooking crowd as the boy finally admits his love to the girl (or the other way round) in a romcom is pretty common, and having a faceoff between the detective and serial killer on the top of a tall building is also hallowed ground.

 

Give your main character an impossible choice

You can read about this in more depth here (http://thenovelfactory.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/secret-to-thrilling-climax-to-your.html) but in essence, this is about giving your protagonist a character defining choice.

Ideally this choice will be between attaining the goal she’s been chasing the whole story – but at a terrible price – and doing the right moral thing, but losing all she’s been personally longing for.

You can make your protagonist make the ‘right’ choice or the ‘wrong’ choice – it really depends on what sort of feeling you want to leave your readers with, the important thing is that the outcome reflects justice.

So if they sacrifice their wants for the greater good, something happens to give them an even better reward.

But if they choose to be selfish, their prize should turn out to be poison.

 

Make the triumph follow a tragedy

This isn’t about what you do in the final scene, but what you do just before it. In the scenes preceding the climax, your lead character should have reached rock bottom, and had a moment so low they could not possibly get any lower. They felt that life was not worth living. There seemed to be no light at the end of the tunnel.

By having this low, it makes the climax, and probably triumph (assuming you’re writing that sort of thing) feel all the more exuberant.

Cameo characters are minor characters who only have a very small part to play in your story, usually to facilitate the plot. 

If you’re a dedicated novelist, you’ll usually write a great deal of detail and back story about all your characters, including history, ancestry, education, preferences, characteristics, what’s in their fridge and all that.

But is that really necessary to that for every single character that appears?

My view is that it’s not, and also that it’s also not necessary to make such an effort make sure all cameo characters are completely unique, balanced and whole human beings (or aliens or hamsters of whatever).

Your main characters have to be filled with conflicts and contradictions and not just fall into the tired old tropes or people will get bored. However, it’s not necessary to do the same with minor or supporting characters, and in fact there are arguments for keeping these characters simple.

The fact is that in real life, we don’t get to know all the nuances and conflicts that are contained within everyone, and we often will put them in one stereotype box or another for ease of reference, and then move on. Obviously, if we get to know them better, we will learn that there is far more to everyone. At that point they cease to become passing acquaintances (or supporting / minor characters) and start to become friends (or major characters).

If you try to make every supporting character too complex, your readers will start to get exhausted trying to keep up with all the nuances, and may lose the plot.

One last thing to say about cameo characters – it is a great opportunity to come up with totally over the top characters for light relief. If a main character is too much of a caricature, then they will probably become tiresome after a while and stop feeling real. But with a supporting character you can give them all kinds of eccentricities, because they’ll only be there long enough to amuse and then they will shuffle off on their way, their bit part complete.

If you're writing a novel and found this article useful, you might want to take a look at our novel writing software. It's completely free to try for 30 days. Click here to visit the novel writing software website and find out more. 

Frankly, I don’t know how writers ever survived before the internet. I suppose they must have gone outside more.

Now, there’s definitely no substitute for real life experience, getting out there and seeing the world for yourself, meeting interesting people, even doing the job of your protagonist.

But it’s not always possible to do so for every single setting and every single character, let alone job.

And for that, we have the internet. Here are some of my favourite resources from the intarwebs, I hope you find them useful.

Plot

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I find the Novel Factory plotting method the most useful (having come up with it and all that) and I couldn’t imagine the tedium of trying to plot my novel without using the software: http://www.novel-software.com/

http://www.novel-software.com/novelwritingroadmap.aspx - Again, I’m going to be unashamedly biased and point out this step-by-step roadmap / formula / thing I’ve developed to help me successfully plot my novels.

Character

http://faceresearch.org/ - create a character portrait by merging the faces of lots of random people. Unfortunately a limitation is the interesting fact that the more you average people’s faces, the more attractive they get, and that it’s face only – no body.

http://whatsin-yourpocket.tumblr.com/ - this person takes pictures of what’s in people’s pockets – great for inspiration for more in-depth character development.

http://www.markmenjivar.com//projects/you_are_what_you_eat - this photographer carried out a project taking pictures of the contents of people’s fridges – fascinating insight into character!

Location

http://www.rightmove.co.uk/ - I often use Rightmove to find out more about where my characters live. It’s fantastic because you can often get blueprints, as well as pictures of the outside, inside and garden of real people’s homes. The only downside is that people tend to make their houses presentable, which is somewhat unrepresentative of reality.

http://www.eplans.com/ - fantastic resource of blueprints and computer generated pictures.

https://www.thehouseplanshop.com – more blueprints, including some commercial buildings – great for getting the nuts and bolts right, especially if you’re plotting a mystery, where the details are critical.

General

http://www.flickr.com/ - there are thousands, probably hundreds of thousands of amateur photographers on flickr, and searching their database can give you better quality imagery than simply searching google images.

http://www.deviantart.com/ - deviant art is a great resource of amazing artwork that can be used to inspire and build depth for character and location.

http://www.google.com/imghp - Google images. Pictures of whatever you want. From the intarwebs.

For more articles about creative writing and novel writing, visit The Novel Factory website.

All stories need conflict – it is their life blood. Without conflict, you have no story, full stop.

Before we go on, it’s important to note that conflict isn’t the same as challenge, such as a big fist fight. A serious lifetime addict not having a cigarette when pregnant is more of a conflict than a martial arts expert beating up twenty baddies.

In this article we’re going to explore four potential areas of conflict: Inner, relationship, organisation and external.

Inner Conflict

Based on the conflicting desires of the protagonist.

For example, Annette wants revenge for her brother’s murder, but the murderer is her own father, who takes care of her vulnerable mother. The conflict comes between the desire for revenge / the familial love for her father / the wish to protect her mother.

The protagonist ostensibly has full control over inner conflict as it is solely up to them to make the decision.

Relationship Conflict

Based on the opposing desires of individual characters.

For example, Betty wants to go out with Carl, but Carl fancies Darren, and Darren wants to marry Annette to get hold of her mother’s fortune.

The protagonist has some control over relationship conflict, though how much depends on their situation and strength of character.

Organisation Conflict

Based on the conflict with organisations in the wider world. A common one is the police or EvilCorp, but it could be a school, boss, publisher etc. It’s usually characterised by a David and Goliath type relationship, and ruthless, faceless opponent.

For example, Emma wants to publicise the fact that EvilCorp is dumping poisoness waste in the water and the local children are being afflicted with horrible diseases that the parents can’t afford to treat and EvilCorp puts publicity, lawyers and hardmen in her way.

The protagonist has a small amount of control over how they can navigate the towering obstacles thrown in their path and force the hand of the organisation.

External Conflict

Based on conflict with random, uncontrollable factors. Such as weather, freak natural phenomenon,

computer malfunction, accidents etc. These are usually better used as incidental factors or to assist with initial story set up, rather than as main story conflicts, because there is so little control, it can feel a bit hopeless or arbitrary – and it’s hard to get real passionate hate for a mindless things that have no emotions or desires themselves.

For example, Freddy wants to get to the hospital where his wife is having his baby, when a freak snowstorm closes all the roads.

The protagonist has no control over how external conflicts play out.

Summary of conflict

Now you’ve read about four different areas of conflict, think about how you use them in your story. Are they all present? Could you make your story stronger by introducing more of them?

For more articles about creative writing and novel writing, visit The Novel Factory website.

When we have emotions, they are accompanied by a range of mental and physical feelings. As authors, we should try to explore all the feelings (even the bad ones) in order to inform our writing and ensure it really reflects reality as closely as possible.

By becoming skilled at translating our own feelings into words that our characters experience, they feel more genuine and real.

Analysing and naming feelings

The first stage is to try to identify each feeling and emotion as exactly as possible.

At a most basic level, you could say that each feeling is good, bad, or neutral. But of course, each of these types can be split into many different variations of emotion, which don’t all sit on a flat sliding scale.

For example, under good we might have: happiness, joy, delight, relaxation, contentment, excitement and anticipation.

Under bad, we might have: sadness, anger, frustration, impatience, depression, discontent, irritation and rage.

Try to label your feelings as accurately as you can as a first stage of identifying the range of emotions and their tones.

Investigating the feeling tone

Once you have started identifying the vast range of emotions in your palette, you can start to look at them more closely in order to notice the tone and physical feelings associated with them. The more you do this the better you get at it and the more detail you notice, which you can then use to inform your writing.

Here are some examples:

Anger

 

Anger is energetic and speedy. It’s hot and explosive and doesn’t pause for thought. It makes you feel tense

and hot. Your heart and breath speed up to feed the energy usage. It often comes with a tightness in the chest.

Next time you’re angry, try to step out of the anger for a moment and experience it as if you were your own character. How would you describe the feeling to a reader? Which part of your body can you feel the strongest? How does it feel?

Delight

Delight is a particular facet of happiness that has an innocent, childlike quality to it. It is usually caused by outside stimulus and leaves us feeling light and buoyant. Our faces feel relaxed and ready to smile and our lungs fill with delicious air. We can feel giddy and lost in the moment and sometimes we might feel like the barriers between us and the rest of the world are not as thick and certain as they usually are.

Next time you feel delighted, try to identify the sensations in your body and mind that make up such a feeling. Notice how your relationship to the world around you changes.

Emptiness

Emptiness is a dark, grey feeling which is hollow and heavy at the same time. We lack energy, and everything seems pointless. Our limbs feel thick and clumsy. Sometimes we may feel unsteady, ungrounded. Our minds feel fuzzy, our thoughts trying to move through thick liquid. Emptiness often feels like it will last forever.

Next time you feel emptiness, try to analyse what makes it ‘emptiness’ and also how the feeling evolves. What immediately preceded the feeling of emptiness – did it come on suddenly or gradually? What happens as the feeling leaves?

Summary

By getting to know our own emotions and feelings and how the sensations affect us both physically and mentally, we expand our toolbox and prose writing depth and range. Bring your characters to life with descriptions of their feelings that really resonate with the reader, because they have their basis in real experience.

It has recently come to my attention that there are some new writers out there that aren’t sure how they should be formatting their manuscripts.

So this post is going to be dedicated to explaining the basic nuts and bolt of fiction formatting – basically how the text is laid out.

It’s important to stress that we are referring to fiction formatting, because formatting for fact based essays follows a different set of rules.

So, here we go:

Font

There is no standard font that you have to use, but as a general rule, if you’re writing for print, you should use a ‘serif’ font, and if you’re writing for a digital medium then you should use a ‘sans-serif’ font.

Serif fonts are ones with little tails and flicks at the end of the letters (such as Times New Roman or Georgia) and Sans Serif fonts are those without (such as Arial and Verdana).

This is because the font affects the readability of text, and for reasons too technical to go into, that is the way that works best.

Personally, I like to use Courier New, which looks like what comes out of a typewriter, because it just looks more writerly.

Also, don’t make the font too small – it’s not just painful for people whose eyesight isn’t perfect, it’s uncomfortable for people with 20/20 too.

Paragraph

Don’t leave line breaks (vertical space) between paragraphs. They should be snug above and below each other, with the exact same amount of space as there is between lines of the same paragraph.

Indents

New paragraphs should be indented by about a finger’s width – except the first one of a chapter  (I know, who comes up with this stuff? But that’s the way it is buster, so get used to it).

Line spacing

Use 1.5 or double line spacing. Otherwise the text ends up looking too dense and people’s eyes get lost while trying to read it.

Column width

This is more relevant for digital publishing, but make sure your columns aren’t too wide. Newspapers use narrow columns because they are easier to read. If the eye is forced to travel too far from left to right, then it loses its place and ends up skipping lines or rereading the same one twice.

Read about time and weather and how they relate to theme and variations in your novel here. 

Feedback is useful. It can help you highlight areas for improvement and can be encouraging, identifying your strengths.

So, it’s a good idea to get your friends and family to read your work, right?

Well, actually no.

It’s fine to get your friends and family to read your manuscript if all you want is to be told how wonderful and amazing it is (depending on how kind your friends and family are…). If that’s your goal then go on ahead and show them.

But as a writer, what you should really be craving is useful critique of your work. Incisive comments regarding character, pace, plot and drive that will help you improve, sentence by sentence, word by word.

Your loved ones are extremely unlikely to be able to supply you with this sort of input.

This is not their fault, it’s simply that in the vast majority of cases, your friends and family will not be professional or experienced writers (if they are, then you are probably the exception to this rule), and in most cases won’t have an interest in words any further than reading magazines and novels.

This means that the insights they can give about your work will be limited to ‘I liked it’ and ‘I didn’t like it’.

And not only are these comments  not particularly constructive, but they may not even be honest. I mean, is your mum really going to tell you she doesn’t like your writing? Probably not. And if your best mate says they don’t like it, it could just be because they like beach romance and you’re writing hardcore sci-fi.

So, if you really want someone to read your work, make it other writers, and make sure you read their work in return.

If you're having trouble coming up with a good idea for plot, or if you're just starting out writing and you're not sure what constitutes a decent plot - one option is to take an existing story that you like, and transpose it.

This gives you a proven working formula for your novel, meaning you can concentrate on learning skills such as character development and writing tight prose. And by using one of the greats, you can learn a lot about the elements that are involved in a good plot on the way.

What do you mean by 'transpose a novel'

When talking about transposing a novel, we usually mean changing the location or era (though there are no laws, so you could switch the genders of all the characters, or turn them into ferret colony). Most commonly, an old classic such as something by Shakespeare will be moved into the modern day.

Transposing a story in this way brings a variety of challenges and opportunities. When using an established plot, you'll still want to make it your own, and to do so, you can take advantage of elements that exist in the new surroundings, that wouldn't have in the original. It can be fun to look for parallels between the two worlds, and if you're really smart, you can make interesting insights about how the world has changed or stayed the same...

For example, the rich feuding families ancient Verona in Romeo and Juliet were morphed into warring gangs in modern day New York in West Side Story (see below for more examples).

Remember that if you chose to follow this route, you're not bound by any rules about what you have to stick to and what you can change - it's completely up to you. You can be as faithful or deviant as you like. You could even change the ending to one you find more satisfying. The main objective is to ensure you breathe new life and flavour into the story, don't simply create a weak copy with only the names of places changed. Be ambitious and create something unique from the ingredients.

Examples of novels and movies that have been transposed:

Probably the most well known story to have been transposed many times is Romeo and Juliet, which has been brought into modern New York Gangland with West Side Story, as well as the Disney movie, High School Musical.


Sherlock Holmes has recently been rebooted by the BBC, who have taken the unusual step of retaining the exact names and characters and simply plopping them down in modern day England. The stories have remained somewhat faithful, but with the addition of modern knwoledge of science technological advancements and some bowing to the local customs (thich less hallucinogenic drugs).


Tess of the D'urbevilles was wrenched out of its rural English home and replanted in modern India, where it flourished as the film, Trishna.

Suggestions for further transpositions:

• Star Wars in a medieval village
• The Hobbit in modern day London
• Les Miserables in futuristic space

What are your favourite modern adaptations of old classics? Do you have any suggestions for transpositions you'd like to read?

If you liked this article, you're love our novel writing software - click here for a free trial.

Lots of people say they'd like to write a novel one day, but so many never get started. These are the three most common reasons (based on anecdotal evidence, at best) for people failing to get started writing their novel:

Procrastination

If you're having trouble getting started writing your novel and you're reading this, then you're almost certainly guilty of procrastination. As soon as they're sat down in front of the computer, people will find all kinds of other things that could be gotten out of the way first - everything from laundry to watering the plants to checking the news to preparing dinner...

Yes, the blank page is a daunting thing, and the first few sentences are arguably the hardest, but at some point you've got to sit down and write some words. Or stop pretending you're going to write a novel. I know it's harsh, but it's only because I care about you.

Fear of Failure

Some people sub-consciously (or consciously) put off getting started because they're afraid of failure. What if they're no good? What if their friends and family laugh at their poor attempts? Well, I'll let you in on a secret. Your first novel? It's not going to be any good. Your first novel is a learning experience - it's not going to be your masterwork. And unless you have spectacularly bad taste in friends and family, nobody is going to be that mean. In anycase, if you're worried about that, don't show them. Personally I don't think sharing work with friends and family is particularly useful anyway, but that's another post.

Finding the Time

This is very closely linked with procrastination. A lot of us are very busy, with full time work or study, chores and other hobbies. So it can feel like it's impossible to find enough time to write a novel. And writing a novel takes a long time. But as the old saying goes, 'If you want something badly enough, you'll make time'.

Even if it's just half an hour a day, that's enough to make progress. Think about how much time you spend on leisure activities such as watching TV or playing computer games - can you shave half an hour off there? Could a parent or friend take over childcare duty for a few hours a week to give you a little time to write?

Once you get over these problems, which are completely unrelated to writing and completely related to character and attitude, you'll be ready to start writing your novel.

As the title suggests, this is the second part of an article about first lines in popular novels. You’ll probably want to take a look at the first article to check out the first lines we’ll be looking at, and see the general conclusions we’ve drawn so far.

In this article we’re going to look at the first line of A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens.

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It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

A TALE OF TWO CITIES (1870), Charles Dickens

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The first thing that strikes me about this first line is that it’s so long. These days you would be extremely unlikely to see any sentence that long, let alone a first line. I mean, it’s an entire paragraph. The first phrase is interesting and intriguing, but in my opinion it would be far stronger if it just stopped there. Instead it waffles on repetitively until the reader is bored, and then finally confused.

I’m sure there will be hundreds of people who will throw their hands in the air for me being so sacrilegious as to criticize the great Charles Dickens, but as far as I’m concerned, nothing should be sacred, because that can only lead to blindness. And you can say I’m simply uneducated and don’t ‘get’ it – that’s a valid opinion. Just as mine is valid.

So, I’m going to say that I think while there are strengths in this line – the juxtaposition, the strength of the opposites, something like this would never be acceptable in modern times.

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I would love to hear other people’s opinions on this.